The First Word: Shortfall

On this day — the Governor gives his state of the state address, the Los Angeles Times comes to Austin and rains on the ‘Texas Miracle’ parade, it’s Day Two for the Senate Finance Committee’s hearings on how public education will be affected by the budget and more information on last week’s rolling blackouts.

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*The State of the State is Strong…*

Gov. Rick Perry will address the state of the state from inside the state… house chamber. Perry will sound many of the same themes he’s been pushing since his re-election campaign — everything in Texas is fine, wonderful, tremendous and dandy; and if anything were wrong (and that’s not to say that anything is wrong) it would obviously be the fault of that federal government.

The Chronicle’s Joe Holley reports:

When Gov. Rick Perry delivers his state of the state address tomorrow morning at 11 he’ll be plowing familiar furrows. So says Perry spokesman Mark Miner. “Many of the issues that the governor’s been talking about he’ll be talking about tomorrow – limited, more efficient government, fiscal responsibility, education. People spoke loud and clear in November that they want limited government and no new taxes, and that’s what he’ll be talking about.”

Miner said the governor would have proposals for both K-12 and higher ed, but he didn’t divulge specifics.

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*So About that ‘Texas Miracle’*

It’s something that I’ve repeatedly mentioned in this morning brief, it’s something that Morning News’ Bob Garrett has written about and it’s something that Paul Krugman opined about the New York Times — but it took the Los Angeles Times putting the story on their front page for the concept to really start to sink in; Texas’ budget crisis is just as bad as California’s.

The article also points out that a large swath of the new jobs that have been created during the ‘Texas Miracle’ are minimum wage jobs (one in four people in Texas has a salary so low that they fall below the federal poverty line) and that Texas is either last or near last when it comes to dropouts, higher education spending and a whole host of other factors:

In a place where government is already lean, there aren’t many areas to make up that kind of cash. The budget blueprint Texas’ Legislature is mulling would mean layoffs for tens of thousands of teachers, closure of community colleges, and a severe reduction in state services for the poor and those with mental health problems.

Texas has a two-year budget cycle, which allowed it to camouflage its red ink last year, thanks in large part to billions of dollars in federal stimulus money. Now, however, “someone just turned the lights on in the bar, and the sexiest state doesn’t look so pretty anymore,” said California Treasurer Bill Lockyer, with evident satisfaction.

The scene in the statehouse in Austin in recent days would be familiar to those who frequent California’s Capitol. Throngs of advocates for the poor, the disabled and the elderly told ashen-faced lawmakers on the Senate Finance Committee about the various horrors that would befall their clients if the state made its planned cuts.

The reporter happens to know a certain something about ashen-faced lawmakers contemplating the latest budget crisis – after all, he’s the Sacramento bureau chief for the Times.

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*… Speaking of the Senate Finance Committee*

The committee is continuing its hearings into how the Senate’s proposed cuts to education will affect school districts and classrooms across the state. Tomorrow’s agenda includes community colleges and the Higher Education Coordinating Board, which probably means that TEXAS Grant funding will come up.

Two state Senate committees plan to hold hearings as soon as next week, while the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which operates the state’s power grid, has given power companies until Thursday to answer questions.

The Texas Railroad Commission, which oversees the state’s natural gas industries, said it has added a discussion of the incident to its regularly scheduled meeting Tuesday in Austin. The PUC, ERCOT, intrastate pipeline operators and other groups are expected to attend the 9:30 a.m. meeting.

The North American Electric Reliability Corporation, a Princeton, N.J.-based regulatory group that oversees power grid reliability issues across the United States and Canada, is also investigating. Among the issues it will look at: How many power plants ERCOT had allowed to be down for maintenance at the time of the outage.

– The Statesman’s Mike Ward breaks some news on how the Texas Department of Criminal Justice plans to balance their books if proposed budget cuts are enacted — reduce drug treatment, lay off prison guards and reduce the number of meals prisoners get.